AWS Aurora was made generally available this week. Aurora is an exciting piece of technology—the RDBMS effectively re-engineered from the ground up—providing exceptional performance for high-traffic databases at a comparatively low cost. Read more about it on the AWS blog. Below we’ll focus on how to migrate your existing data into Aurora. Amazon has some documentation for migrating an existing MySQL […]

What started out as a fun project in support of kids at an annual Hackathon event quickly turned into a real-world test bed for an upcoming cloud-based open data portal rollout – and changed the way they work.

I think we can all agree that 3D is quickly becoming a dominant data type. Drones and LiDAR scanners are widespread. 3D cameras and printing are all the rage at tech fairs these days. Augmented reality is… well, a reality. And don’t even get me started on what people are doing with Minecraft. Esri users looking to […]

There’s a reason Esri has the dominant share of the GIS industry. ArcGIS is to geo geeks what Photoshop is to a hipster with a Nikon. But here’s the thing: hundreds—thousands—of data formats exist, each tailored to represent data in a specialized way, and ArcGIS natively supports only a handful. Without a way to get […]

I was recently asked about what guidelines there are for authoring workspaces in FME.

I can tell you what makes a workspace good, but it’s perhaps a little harder to say what makes a workspace bad. If a workspace runs to completion, and produces the output you want, it can’t be bad… can it?

Although I’m amused at Minecraft’s block-like appearance, it does undoubtedly show there is an incredible appetite for 3D environments.

Right now it’s hard to fully satisfy that appetite because we’re all into web 2.0 and mobile devices, and 3D has a way to go in terms of data formats that can be streamed and tools that can visualize that streamed data.

Yesterday we tried something new. We put Safe Software co-founders Don and Dale in a webcast room and bombarded them with questions for an hour. In our first-ever “Ask Me Anything”, we covered everything from LiDAR to the Stanley Cup. Don and Dale discussed what the future holds for spatial data and FME technology, offered […]

If you follow me on Twitter you might already guess what my project is about: sundials!

What triggered this project is that FME 2015 got a new transformer called the SurfaceFootprintReplacer. As the name suggests, the primary use is to create a footprint from a 3D feature such as a building. But a footprint is really just an overhead shadow, and the transformer also has options for adding the direction of the light source, so that we can cast an oblique shadow…

FME Cloud has been live for over 18 months now, and one of the biggest hurdles customers face is moving their datasets into the cloud—particularly if they are large. Below are the three main data upload challenges we see. Most scenarios we’ve seen involve loading data up to Amazon Web Services (AWS), since FME Cloud runs on AWS, […]